Common Testing Issues

21Jul

What are the key things that we find are issues for software testing? How can we address these problems? In my experience we usually have a solution to most of the problems – we just need to identify the problems and then we can workshop the solutions!

I think there are two key issues
– We (testers and the team) think testers should be able to simply walk in and test the system without time for learning, understanding and communication. So testers feel they should succeed on a project without being set up for success
– Many team members think testing is a separate function – “I do stuff and he/she tests it”.

The simple answer is to engage testers early to both learn about the project and help the crew with how to validate their own work (ie prove it had value).

Good points John, although the concept of “premature” delivery of code is interesting. It can be benefitial to get code early, even partitially completed code, but if it is not yet ready to test, it can be delivered too early.

James – you have hit the nail on the head, we need to have testers involved earlier and we need to encourage everyone in the project to be focussed on Quality. This would work to swiftly eradicate my “top 10”. But….how do we convince people to do this??